Actually, weird things happen here when you compare direct export and using AME, depending on what the source material is and what the end result must be. Adobe is aware of these issues. A bug report has been filed.

What happens, and I only have figures for my system, but it will give you an idea of what is going on and that has been corroborated by others, including Adobe.

If you consider that DV AVI export in CS5 with AME is around 4 times slower than CS4, you will realize that the AVI exporter plug-in has some bugs in it, that do not happen with direct export.

If you consider the MPEG encoding times, again something really weird is going on here, because the scaling for this export is done with hardware MPE. This means that direct export should be much faster when using PR than using AME, but the opposite is true.

The only consistency I have found is H.264 with equal times for direct export and AME, which is logical since it is so much dependent on CPU/RAM communication and cache size.

Harm, thank you very much for your response. I thought I was going crazy there for a while.

Great to hear Adobe is working on this because the differences are quite significant, as you also have found out. With one-format exports, exporting directly out of PPro is fine, but, like I'm sure most users, I have to produce multiple formats.